Holyrood Park distillery wins planning consent

Proposals to build an urban whisky distillery in Edinburgh have been toasted by planners after they granted planning permission to repurpose a B-listed engine shed on St Leonard’s Lane to form a distillery and visitor centre.

The £3.6m Holyrood Park project has been conceived by David Robertson, a former master distiller at The Macallan, and will be signposted from the road by a new gatehouse and canopy formed from dark timber.

In a statement 7N Architects said: “The Holyrood Park Distillery will bring the utilitarian 19th century Engine Shed building back into working use as place of production that will be experienced by a wide range of visitors, restoring Single Malt Distilling to the city after 90 years.”

Consulting engineers Blyth & Blyth assisted with design work on the distillery, which will be operational by 2017.

So much for meeting the end of 2017 operational deadline. These new distillery projects almost always are planned over optimistically. No word so far if the cloud funding has been successful, and the new deadline is now end 2018. Perhaps this is still over optimistic, but l for one, along with many others, look forward to whisky distilling returning to Edinburgh after so many years of absence, in the fine, historic, engine shed in St Leonards